Posted by: Toddi Gutner on December 27, 2005

A new year means a new list of home improvement projects. Each year, my husband and I trade off who gets to spend the budget for house projects—-2005 was his year. He takes care of the outside of our Westchester, N.Y. home, and last summer he had a lovely flagstone patio and retaining wall built.

This year is my year, and I take care of the inside of the house. That means two of the four bathrooms in our 1967 colonial house have got to be remodeled. They’re so retro looking that they’re almost new millennium cool, but I’m all for getting rid of the bright yellow and powder blue-tiled bathrooms.

Still, every homeowner has those nagging questions: What’s the financial benefit of a remodeling job? Will I get my money back? Well, I was happy to find out that yes indeed, I will not only get my money back from my bathroom remodel but I can actually expect to make money, according to a National Association of Realtors (NAR) report. http://www.realtor.org/publicaffairsweb.nsf/Pages/CostvsValue2005?OpenDocument Below is an excerpt:

Many homeowners who complete midrange bathroom remodels can expect to make money; the cost on a national average for this project is $10,499, and the return is $10,727, or 102.2 percent, compared with 87.5 percent in 2002. On average, major midrange kitchen remodels cost $43,862 and return $39,920, or 91 percent of the costs to remodel, up from 66 percent in 2002.

Though we’re not thinking of selling our house anytime soon, it’s nice to have those nagging questions put to rest.

Reader Comments

Anna

January 5, 2006 4:26 PM

A bathroom remodel just barely pays for itself in resale value today, whereas it did not in 2002?
Don't you think this has something to do with the inflated home-price environment we are in right now?

My guess is that the ability to capture renovation cost at resale time is not going to last long now that the housing market has begun its long slide downward.

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BusinessWeek editors Chris Palmeri, Prashant Gopal and Peter Coy chronicle the highs and lows of the housing and mortgage markets on their Hot Property blog. In print and online, the Hot Property team first wrote about the potential downside of lenders pushing riskier, "option ARM" mortgages and the rise in mortgage fraud back in 2005—well ahead of many other media outlets. In 2008, Hot Property bloggers finished #1 in a ranking of the world's top 100 "most powerful property people" by the British real estate website Global edge. Hot Property was named among the 25 most influential real estate blogs of 2007 by Inman News.